Issa and His Aide

There’s a Politico story out about Kurt Bardella, the spokesman for Congressman Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and the subject of a recent profile I wrote for The New Yorker.

The Politico story, which was broken by Marin Cogan and Jake Sherman, reported that Issa was investigating whether Bardella forwarded and blind-copied private e-mails to Mark Leibovich, a New York Times reporter who is writing a book about Washington. This afternoon, Issa fired Bardella. (Full disclosure: both Cogan and Leibovich are friends of mine.)

I’m somewhat mystified that Issa required an “investigation” to get to the bottom of this, because inside Issa’s office there was no secret about Bardella’s cooperation. When I was writing my profile of Issa, Bardella openly discussed his cooperation with Leibovich—and not just with me, but with his direct boss as well. For example, during a meeting with Bardella and Issa’s chief of staff, Dale Neugebauer, the three of us had a light-hearted discussion about how extensively Bardella was working with Leibovich.

“So you know about this, right?” I asked Neugebauer.

“Oh yeah. Yeah, he knows,” Bardella said.

“He [Bardella] just got to Washington and he’s got a book about him coming out,” I noted.

“I know, no kidding,” Neugebauer said.

In a later conversation, Bardella told me, “I’ve shared a lot with [Leibovich].” He added, “I have provided him with a lot of content. I BCC him on certain projects that I’m working on.” Bardella said he shared information that shows “this is how it happens” and “this is the conversation I’m having right now.”

“Do the other folks in the office know?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Bardella said, and he gave me an example of the type of stuff he shares: “Here’s this inquiry I got from a reporter. Here’s what I said to my staff about it, here’s the story, here’s the e-mail I just got from so-and-so, another reporter who’s upset that I gave his story to [someone else].”

At another point in one of our conversations, Bardella explained that getting news in partisan outlets— he cited the Daily Caller, the Washington Examiner, and the Washington Times—was easy, but it didn’t have the same impact as getting something in the mainstream press. He explained that he had recently leaked a report on ACORN to the New York Times, which had run what was, in his view, a good story for Issa. He then received an e-mail from an aide to Senator Susan Collins, he said, who complained about not being part of the decision to leak the report. Bardella said that he sent the e-mails documenting the whole drama to Leibovich.

“I blind-copied Mark in my response,” he said, “which was, given that my options were the Examiner or the New York Times, I’m not exactly going to apologize for the result that I just produced that you would not have. You had the report for four days and you didn’t do shit with it.”

While I was trailing Issa at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Bardella elaborated further on the kind of material he was sharing with Leibovich. Here’s a partial transcript of our interview:

KURT BARDELLA: I give him a LOT. I really want him to see what exactly my job is like. One of the biggest [inaudible] misconceptions that drives me crazy is when the press characterizes Darrell as “Darrell, a publicity-seeking whatever.” And Mark has seen—I forwarded him, like, fifty-five e-mails of reporters and producers embarrassingly like begging to have Darrell on. And I said, “Listen, I’m not gonna say that we don’t try to get press, BUT they are enablers and they are as much a part of that if not more so than we are at this point.” I can’t believe these guys are putting this in writing, it’s embarrassing.

RYAN LIZZA: What do they say?

BARDELLA: Oh, “Happy New Year! We love working with you! It’s gonna be an exciting time! We would love to have him on, any time that you have available! Any day! We’ll keep it open for you!” And they’ll do that, like, every two or three days. I’ll say, “No, no.” “Is it something that we did? Are you mad at us? Can we talk about it? Can we come by?”—they are so overly—

LIZZA: Who’s the worst?

BARDELLA: Um—I would say just TV bookers in general are all pretty bad. It cracks me up when MSNBC does it though. I wrote back to them, like, “I just watched your network, like, ream Darrell for, like, nine hours straight, why on earth would I put him on any of your shows?”

The funny thing is when they do the “Can we be your first MSNBC”—they compete against their own shows—so, “Please, don’t put him on this show, they suck and their ratings are horrible, but if you wanna be on ours”—… It’s so petty. I just laugh. You guys gotta do what you gotta do, I get that. But when all of you guys write your “Darrell Issa publicity-seeking hound,” I’m, like, “Remember all of these e-mails here?” Print reporters are the same way.

This long back and forth was the lead-in to a Bardella quote I used in the piece:

[R]eporters e-mail me saying, “Hey, I’m writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?” I’m, like, “You guys are going to write that we’re the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!”

To me that last quote was one of the most important things Bardella told me. The rest of it—that offices clash over how to leak info and that bookers and reporters are competitive—is interesting but relatively well known, and not very relevant to a piece about Darrell Issa. But that Bardella accused reporters of offering to collaborate with Issa as he launches what will inevitably be partisan investigations of the Obama Administration seemed jaw-dropping. This is exactly the dysfunctional investigator/reporter dynamic that in the nineteen-nineties fed frenzies over every minor Clinton scandal. In his short-lived career, Bardella was witness to the fact that it was all starting over in 2011, now that there was again a Republican House and a Democratic President. From what I know of what Bardella shared, the beat reporters who cover Issa and engaged in this kind of game with Bardella will be the ones most embarrassed by the e-mails that Leibovich possesses.

Illustration: Daniel Adel.

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.